More myth than man

Laurens van der Post was a writer, war hero and guru to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher. But, says his biographer JDF Jones, he was also a compulsive liar whose hatred of Mandela proved a threat to South Africa's future

Laurens van der Post lived a very full and long life. Born in 1906 in an obscure "dorp" (small town) in the Orange Free State, he died in a Chelsea penthouse in London two days after his 90th birthday. As a young man he went out in search of a wider world, which led him as a journalist to Durban, Japan and England. Thereafter, he divided his life, and his loyalties, between Britain and South Africa.

After surviving Japanese PoW camps, he set off on a sequence of expeditions to Africa, which became the subject of his most popular books and assured him lifelong success as a writer. He became a mythologist for the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert; he began as an enemy of apartheid and ended as a champion of the Zulus; he popularised the work of the psychologist Carl Jung; he wrote travel books and novels, made television films, and saw several of his books adapted for the cinema.

An Afrikaner without a drop of British blood, he became a proud member of the British establishment and friend and adviser to Prince Charles and Mrs Thatcher. In his later years, he used his fame and popularity to promote the causes which were dear to him, particularly the environment.

Many love his books, regarding them as spiritually and morally inspiring. But after his death in 1996, doubts about their author began to be raised. His reputation as a secular saint suffered with the emergence of an illegitimate daughter whose mother he had seduced when she was 14. When I embarked on his biography, the closer I got to his story, the more the suspicion grew that Van der Post wasn't all that he said he was.

My research showed him to be a compulsive fantasist, not just in his fiction but in the autobiographical books which he presented as non-fiction. His descriptions of his family background were fanciful; he falsely claimed that his father was a Dutch aristocrat and said his maternal grandfather had killed the last Bushman painter. (In the course of my research I discovered that, in reality, his mother was descended from a Hottentot princess, though it is unlikely that Van der Post knew this.)

He misrepresented his wartime career, claiming that he was a lieutenant-colonel when he was an acting captain. He falsely claimed that he had co-founded the Capricorn movement (a political grouping in central and east Africa which attempted to propose a multiracial solution for the region) and that he was the architect of the Rhodesian settlement in 1980. Almost all the tales Van der Post related throughout his life, and which he claimed were personally told him by a Bushman, were in fact drawn from the research of a 19th-century German scholar, Dr Wilhelm Bleek.

Time after time, the storyteller's tales about himself were inaccurate, embellished, exaggerated, distorted or invented. Put more bluntly, he was a constant liar.

The literal truth was never of much interest to Laurens van der Post because he preferred what he described as the truth of the imagination. This was not merely a version he delivered to the outside world, it was allowed to invade his private life, too. To name an early example, in 1941, he sent the woman who was to be his second wife, Ingaret Giffard, long, fictitious descriptions of his wartime exploits in Abyssinia over six months which he had spent in the Middle East.

The question arises why an Afrikaner brought up in a Calvinist culture should feel so tempted by the freedom of fantasy. Evidently the inclination was there from his youth when, isolated in a small community and inspired by his father's excellent European library, he dreamed of a quest for the Grail, of Odysseus, of the Knights of the Round Table.

Disposed from childhood to embroider and invent, he discovered that, thanks to his charm and eloquence, he could convince people and untruth became the pattern of his life.

Occasionally, he admitted this. In one of his last books, A Walk With A White Bushman, he writes : "This is one of the problems for me: stories in a way are more completely real to me than life in the here and now. A really true story has transcendent reality for me which is greater than the reality of life. It incorporates life but it goes beyond it."

The woman who looked after him for the last four years of his life, housekeeper Janet Campbell, later said: "He was such an astonishing liar it seemed as automatic and necessary to him as breathing, from some flim-flam to do with socks to the engorged fabrication of his deeds. Consequently I found it impossible to see him as anything but his own invention."

How many of these myths were also self-delusion is hard to tell, but his capacity to present a false image to others was coupled with a tendency to overestimate his own abilities. In one case, his meddling threatened the fragile stability of South Africa and could have endangered many lives.

Increasingly vain in his later years, he decided to play a key background role in political events in the region. He liked to say he was a key figure in the Rhodesian settlement in 1980, but there is no evidence for this claim. He did, however, get involved - much more dangerously - in the events preceding the majority-rule election in South Africa in 1994, which would lead to the emergence of Nelson Mandela's ANC government.

Van der Post's great ally and friend was Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, often called "Gatsha" by his intimates. Buthelezi played a pivotal and controversial role in South African affairs from the mid-1970s, when he founded the Zulu cultural movement Inkatha, based in the Zulu heartland of Natal. The chief bravely refused to accept for his 7m Zulus the "independence" which Pretoria was thrusting on the "Bantustans".

Van der Post was first introduced to Buthelezi in 1977 and the friendship lasted for the rest of his life. They met frequently, in London and in South Africa, and their correspondence over these years was considerable and conspiratorial.

Chief Buthelezi has never been an easy man to deal with, as many politicians and journalists would confirm. He was and is ambitious, touchy, verbose and mercurial, and his relationship with the ANC soon collapsed. Even while defying the pressures of the apartheid government, he came to believe that the ANC - many of whose leaders were in exile - were quasi-communists who were planning to drag his KwaZulu-Natal into a unitary, Xhosa-dominated South Africa. [Mandela and others in the ANC leadership were members of the Xhosa tribe.]

Buthelezi became a respectful, even extravagant, admirer of Van der Post, who responded with affection as well as gratification. The author had found a black leader who abhorred communism, as he did; who had broken with the ANC; who opposed the "armed struggle"; and who seemed happy to agree to a gradualist approach towards a more democratic system in South Africa on a federal model. Buthelezi also represented the traditional Zulu cultural values which were as close as Van der Post could get to his dream of the primitive man in modern Africa.

Why would a fiercely ambitious South African politician and tribal leader like Buthelezi pay court to an elderly expatriate writer? The answer, confirmed by the chief's closest advisers, is that Van der Post had been identified as the gatekeeper not just to the British prime minister but also, perhaps even more important, to the future king, the Prince of Wales. If Prince Charles could be enlisted to the Zulu cause, and could be persuaded to use his influence on behalf of that cause, who knows what might be achieved?

Van der Post introduced Buthelezi to the prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, in August 1985. This meeting, he assured her diary secretary, would be "extremely important not only for Britain and South Africa but the world". Gatsha, he went on, would be the key element in the South African situation, so long as he was not assassinated by the ANC. "This could be one of the most important meetings ever held between a British prime minister and the leader of the biggest nation in South Africa," he wrote. In this same month, Van der Post introduced Buthelezi to Prince Charles, Charles Powell (the private secretary at number 10) and the foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Throughout the next 12 months, Van der Post had various meetings with the prime minister, as well as frequent contacts with the Prince of Wales. He continued to liaise between the chief and the Tory government. In July 1988, for instance, he arranged another meeting with Mrs Thatcher and then with Prince Charles, and again in October 1989, Van der Post told Charles Powell that he had instructed Gatsha to prepare meticulously for his next meeting with Thatcher; the Zulu leader "really has no substitute," he said. He wrote to Buthelezi to assure him that "our Lady and our beloved Young Man - who follows your fortunes so closely - are well informed".

Buthelezi had extended the authoritarian grip of Inkatha across the whole of his province of KwaZulu-Natal, so that it had become a compulsory mass movement of the Zulu people, assured of the financial backing of the apartheid government in Pretoria. At the same time, the United Democratic Front (UDF), which was a cover for the banned ANC, was trying to build its position in KwaZulu, and was doing so successfully in the urban areas. Here were the seeds of civil war.

The South African Defence Force was beginning to arm Inkatha and encourage attacks on ANC supporters, it was later revealed. A total of 20,000 lives would eventually be lost in intra-Zulu fighting. Buthelezi sent several hundred Inkatha soldiers for secret training with the Defence Force. We must assume that Van der Post did not know this.

Thatcher, thanks in part to Van der Post's activities, had become Buthelezi's most committed supporter overseas. At Commonwealth meetings in 1986 and 1987, Thatcher continued to insist that the ANC was a terrorist organisation and refused to recognise it. This was the period when Britain's foreign office diplomats, famously disrespected by their prime minister, would work on her to shift her South African policy, and then watch with horror as Van der Post arrived in Downing Street to spend the afternoon telling her Zulu stories, after which British policy would change back.

On February 2 1990, President FW de Klerk made his momentous speech to parliament in Cape Town, in which he announced the legalisation of the ANC and the release of political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. At this point, Van der Post's critical attitude towards Mandela became uncontrolled and irrational and would remain so.

He and his friends, he said in a memo to Margaret Thatcher on February 13, had "fought the battle of apartheid... for many more years than Mandela". He declared that Mandela had brought no vision of the future to South Africa, only tired and well-worn cliches: "All I heard was slogans - the moth-eaten fourth-hand clothes of the spirit." He and Mandela had both been in prison, the greatest school that a human being can have in life, where his own "best" jail experience had been worse than Mandela's worst, he said. (Van der Post had spent three years in Japanese PoW camps; Mandela was in prison in South Africa for 27 years.) He described Buthelezi as "a man of vision... better prepared that any leader in South Africa to lead the way ahead". Van der Post was evidently terrified that the future of his homeland would now be negotiated between Mandela and De Klerk - which is precisely what happened over the next four years.

Van der Post then became involved with the far right in South Africa and also with the maverick right in Britain. In November 1992, he was introduced to John Aspinall, the eccentric and wealthy casino operator, zookeeper and "honorary White Zulu". Aspinall and Van der Post immediately formed a friendship, having in common a passionate commitment to the African environment and the cause of the traditional Zulu nation. Through Aspinall, Van der Post met Sir James Goldsmith, the tycoon, and Kerry Packer, the Australian media billionaire.

Van der Post, with the enthusiastic support of Aspinall and Goldsmith, was urging on Buthelezi the loosest possible federal system for the new South Africa in which KwaZulu-Natal would be granted a maximum degree of self-rule with the clear aim of holding the ANC and its allegedly communist policies at bay. The temptation and the danger, in the highly charged atmosphere of these years, was that a demand for federation, if denied, might turn into a break-out for secession.

In this delicate and perilous situation, in which South Africa was threatened with Balkanisation, Van der Post sought to involve Charles. He assured the prince in a long memorandum dated September 5 1993: "Gatsha may be driven to going it alone... We have got to go all out to prevent an election before we have a proper constitution. I wonder if you could possibly feel what sort of initiative we might launch from this country to send an invitation to leaders to meet and talk together in confidence, under the guidance of one immensely respected person as chairman..."

This was surely an invitation to the prince to volunteer to chair a meeting which might discuss the dismemberment of South Africa. It was, as one of Buthelezi's most senior advisers later confirmed, a long-term Zulu plan - "the prince coming out for the Inkatha Freedom Party".

Prince Charles had met the chief several times through Van der Post, for instance on May 1 1993, when he invited him to visit his Highgrove home privately. The consequences of support from the heir to the British throne for the Zulu leader before the multiracial election scarcely months away would have been disastrous, for the prince as well as for British policy, and also for ANC-Zulu relations. However, Charles had the wisdom to hold back, whatever his sympathies and whatever his respect for Van der Post's guidance.

At this most inflammable moment in the resistance of the Zulu leadership towards a unitary South Africa, while thousands of lives were being lost, a more modest man might have used his influence on Buthelezi to urge compromise and reconciliation. On the contrary, on December 21 1993, Van der Post sent a message to the chief: "You must prepare as I'm certain you have already started to prepare, for the period in which you have to go alone and take what you can of Natal with you."

This comes very close to incitement to secession, which would have led to a catastrophic civil war and, if Prince Charles had spoken publicly, to a constitutional crisis in Britain. In the end, Buthelezi also resisted Van der Post's arguments and, at the last moment, took Inkatha into the April election. To the dismay and consternation of Van der Post, he then agreed to join Mandela's Government of National Unity, where he sits to this day. But Van der Post continued to urge the chief to abandon the "communists" in Cape Town and return to Ulundi, his bush capital, to build an African Utopia - "a model of a new world".

In his letters, van der Post continued to imply that he had the Prince of Wales on his side. On March 12 1996, for example, he wrote to assure the chief that the prince was still active on his behalf: "Your host in the country is doing a quite remarkable intervention with people in the right places who might help your cause in this country . . . His regard for you is higher than ever and he has a deep fellow feeling that in some way, his life is bonded with yours and that you both have to soldier on and the light will shine upon you both again."

Of course, there is no reason to suppose that Laurens van der Post was reporting the prince's deeds and feelings accurately. He was always a master of embellishment and fantasy.

 Adapted from Storyteller: The Many Lives Of Laurens van der Post by JDF Jones, published this week by John Murray (£25). To order a copy for £21 plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.